by Laura Lanni
Bethany never doubted a word her brilliant mother said and wouldn’t believe me or her teacher, so I didn’t argue. She turned back from the field of future burgers and asked, “Will they always be baldies now?” Like her mother, my daughter was capable of multiple, simultaneous, unrelated conversations—from a field of cow to the side effects of chemotherapy to who knew where we’d go next.
“It takes a while, but usually the hair grows back.” If they live long enough.
She held up her long ponytail. “I have lots of hairs. Can’t I give ’em some of mine?”
Ah, there’s that missing s. I smiled but didn’t correct my daughter this time. This was her mother’s territory. I’d heard Anna, while tucking Bethany in one night, try to explain why, even if there are a hundred pieces in a bowl, we still call it “popcorn” but we never say we have a bowl of “potato chip” unless there is only one left. Bethany had argued if there was only one potato chip, we wouldn’t even need the bowl. They giggled together over that and plural words became their bedtime game—to s, or not to s.
“Actually, you can give them some of yours. There’s an organization that takes hair donations, mostly from little girls like you. They make wigs for sick kids. Would you like to do that?”
“Yes, Daddy!” she squealed. “Let’s go to there right now!”
So that’s where we went next. I was so caught up in her enthusiasm that I brought her to my barber and had ten inches of her silky hair chopped off. My girl was delighted as she carried the long hank of her hair to my truck—to bring home to show her mother.
I should have known how Anna would react. She was always a bit sensitive about hair.
Bethany ran in from the garage screaming, “Mommy! Mom! I need you now!”
Anna appeared right away, saw our little girl and screamed, “Who scalped you?”
When I walked in behind Bethany, Anna’s huge eyes landed on my smiling, guilty face.
“Eddie! I will kill you! Why did you do this?” She sank to her knees in front of the still beaming Bethany and gingerly touched the ends of her butchered hair. “Oh. My. God!”
There was nothing I could say, so I didn’t even try. It would be like arguing about whether to add an s to cow or popcorn. Besides, any comments from me about hair had been forbidden a decade ago on our first date. It was my number one No-Go zone. Fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything because I was saved by the six-year-old wizard.
“I’m donut—danish—giving it away, Mommy!” She bounced up and down and squealed with delight, her face all smiles. Anna wept silently, but there was no denying this little girl. “It’s okay, Mommy. It’s for the sick kids at Daddy’s hospital.” She wrapped an arm around her mother’s shoulders and patted her back. Anna wiped her eyes, smiled, and pulled Bethany to her in a bear hug. Perhaps I was home free.
Over Bethany’s head, I ventured a single line in my defense, “It’s only hair, Anna.” It was a risk, but worth it when she let out a snort. I still had it. I could still make her laugh.
Thus began Bethany’s hair cycle. She’d grow her hair all the way down her back and then hack it off and give it away—like a hair farm. She managed a donation almost every eighteen months for the rest of her life.
35
My Joey
Joey was my pal. I’d tiptoed around in Estrogen World with Anna and Bethany for more than a decade when, suddenly, I had a little boy in my life. My Joey was quiet, like his namesake, my grandfather. He liked to fish and look at books, to draw and think. He’d learned his numbers and letters before his second birthday and was reading when he was three. The kid was a genius. He spent hours under his bed. He was always thinking and had endless questions, none of them about adding s.
“Dad, tell me about the moon.”
This was at bedtime, six months before his mother died. I figured he was stalling and wanted to draw me into a long discussion that I couldn’t escape, to prolong the tucking in process and put off sleep. I told him, “Our moon is a big rock that orbits our planet.” Simple statement. Answered the question. Case closed. Right?
Wrong. “What’s ‘orbits’? Like the gum?”
“No. Not gum.” I scratched my head and sat down on his bed. “The moon orbits the Earth, um ...” I had to define the word without using the word. “It means the moon travels in a path around the Earth.”
“Oh, okay. A big rock, huh? Can we go there and touch it?”
“Well, I guess, in theory, we could go there. We’d need a big rocket though.” I tucked his blankets in tight on the sides the way he liked, but left them loose on his feet.
He snuggled down with his black bear, wiggling his toes, ready to chat the night away, and said, “Cool. Let’s get a rocket and go. Does the rocket fly us there?”
“Mostly the rocket part is to help us escape the gravity of this planet and to steer the spaceship in space.”
Anna came in to say good-night. She kissed Joey and sat down beside me on the edge of his bed. “What’re you guys talking about?”
“Mom! Me and Daddy are going to the moon! We’d have a spaceship, too, right, Dad? How does the gravity thing work? Could we go other places besides the moon?”
“I guess. It depends on how much fuel we bring along. Fuel can be heavy. We’d have to balance the weight of our fuel with our rocket-thrusting capacity and the distance we wanted to cover. We’d have to bring along food, too, because there’s no food in space.” Yeah, he sucked me into his imagination again. Joey made life fun.
“Hmm. We’d have to balance our fuel with our weight in Oreos. I’d need Oreos. We could leave Mom’s granola cereal here, though.”
Anna laughed. “Leave it here with me. I’m not going to the moon.”
“And what’s gravity?” he asked like a dog with a bone. Joey had an incredible mind. He had excellent short- and long-term memory and never forgot a thing. Well, except for where he’d left his blue plastic cowboys. But I always suspected he was just too lazy to look for them. Or else he enjoyed watching his Mom find where he hid them.
Anna took a turn. “Gravity is what holds us all on the Earth. It’s an attraction between the world and each of us. There’s a gravitational force between every two objects, even you and me. Here, give me a hug—that’s the force at work, pulling us together.”
While he endured a hug from his mom, Joey dug his index finger two knuckles deep into his left nostril and tried the word “gravitational.”
My boy wiped the boogies off his finger on the sheet, out of his mother’s view. “Daddy, where can we get a rocket?” I realized he wasn’t just stalling. Maybe he was at first, but now he was really interested in this. I shouldn’t have misled him into thinking it was a possibility.
“Listen, Joey. I was just talking in theory here. I don’t have a rocket, and I don’t have enough money to buy one or the brains to build one.” His face fell.
“It’s okay, Dad. I’ll figure it out.”
Anna kissed his cheek and said, “I love you to the moon, Joey.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
After she left, Joey started a dig in his other nostril as I turned out the light. I kissed his forehead, and when I turned to leave, his voice asked from the darkness, “Is ‘in theory’ the same as when Mom says we could eat Oreos for every meal?”
“Your mom says that?”
He laughed. “Yeah. Then she says I should eat my granola, or peas, or mashed potatoes, or whatever thing I don’t like that day.”
“I guess that’s the same ‘in theory.’ It means it’s possible but not likely. Got that?”
“Got it. ’Night, Daddy.”
“Sleep good, Joey.”
36
All Roads Lead to Dogs
Early in our marriage, Anna and I did everything together. We even ran together. That’s how I first learned about the dogs, which eventually led to finding out her deathday.
We were jogging on a country road behind the high school football field when two fr
isky Dobermans chased us. Anna panicked and took off sprinting and screaming. She was hysterical. I kicked at one of them and the dogs ran away, but she was still shaky. When we got home and were cooling down with water on the swing, she told me all about her life with dogs. Her dad had a pack of dogs that worshipped him and followed him on his long walks, but Anna was always afraid of strange dogs when she was little. Although her fear faded with time, a barking dog that she didn’t know always scared her silly. I tucked this information away for further analysis.
I asked Anna’s dad about her fear of dogs. That’s when he told me about Molly and the attack that occurred when Anna was just a baby. He said Anna didn’t remember much about it, and they rarely spoke of it, but he always felt that it was the root of her fear. I questioned him, rather extensively, about the timing of the attack. He remembered that Anna’s mom was pregnant with Michelle. He thought it was sometime in October or November. From then on, like a paranoid hypochondriac, I watched Anna every fall for any signs of danger. And I relaxed, floating carefree, the rest of the year. To my wife, I must’ve seemed like two different husbands.
When Bethany was eight, mid-November was verified and the actual date revealed. Anna had to go to a meeting in the middle of one of Bethany’s soccer games and was rear-ended by a speeding sixteen-year-old driver. Our totaled van leaned in the ditch at the side of the road. I ran like a madman from the soccer field and thought, damn it, now I know the date for sure. I was astonished to find my Anna still alive.
It was November eleventh, and Anna had avoided her space-time gap like a champ.
Afterward, I didn’t know how I’d missed it. Anna always loved November eleventh and 11:11 on the clock. The parallel ones, the symmetry—she loved everything about elevens. The number is a palindrome. When doubled or squared, it makes two more palindromes. She even took her obsession a step further and declared a special affection for the number fifteen because it is written as 1111 in binary. November eleventh became the black hole of each successive year of our marriage.
When Anna began to train for her distance races, she did it with a single-minded fury. There was no stopping her. Each time she left the house to run alone on the country roads, she was gone longer and longer. She never decided how long to run until she was up the church hill. Then she’d analyze how she felt and decide on her route. It was futile for me to ask her how long she’d be gone when she wiggled her feet into her pre-tied sneakers and checked the batteries in her MP3 player. It made her mad to be questioned. She didn’t like to tell me a certain planned distance and then have to admit when she returned that she ran less.
I didn’t care how far she ran. I just wanted to know when to start searching for her body—especially in November.
I tried to pull off this questioning as a joke.
“Anna,” I tried to sound nonchalant as I followed her to the door, “I just need to know how long to wait before I come searching for your body in the ditch.”
She flashed her scariest teacher glare at me and said, “Don’t be mean to me, Eddie.”
This, of course, caused a vivid flashback to our first date—that day when she first warned me never to be mean to her. As she slammed out the door, I tried to salvage myself by yelling, “Your hair looks great!”
One day I’d learn. But not too soon.
I tried not to ask about her running schedule but failed. I tried not to worry about her. I failed again.
She came home from one run in the spring and told me about the three large dogs on her six-mile course. I lost all control; I broke out in a panic. This was her favorite path to run. There was no way I could talk her out of it.
I got out her sewing machine.
It was a Saturday, and there was no one home but me. I had no idea how to use the thing. It looked like the thread was in it already, so I plugged it in and put the pedal to the floor like Anna always did. My attempt at high-tech sewing was a disaster. The machine jammed and wouldn’t turn. After almost an hour of mistakes, I found out why that little knife thing is called a seam ripper. Finally, I gave up with the machine. I threaded a needle and sewed by hand. Not much different from giving a kid stitches, really, minus the tears and wiggling. I sewed little white felt pockets onto four pairs of Anna’s running shorts. I filled two-ounce spray bottles with diluted ammonia and slid them into the pockets.
I was working on the last pocket, bent over like a pretzel, when Anna walked in from the garage. I was busted.
She gave me a crooked smile and tipped her head to the side. “Eddie? What are you doing to my shorts? And what’s that smell?”
“Ammonia. Sorry, I spilled some. Well, quite a bit. I don’t smell it anymore. I wonder if that’s bad.”
“Yes, it’s bad,” she said as she walked past me to open the window. She came back and leaned over my shoulder. “Tell me, Ed. Why are you ruining my most favorite shorts on the planet?”
Rather than try to explain, I held up my best effort—one pair even looked decent, the other three were drastically crooked—and, proud of myself, proclaimed, “Pockets!”
It came out more like a question. Anna frowned and took the shorts from me. She stuck two fingers into the felt pouch and asked, “For what?”
“For safety.” I nodded and tried to sound authoritative.
“A safety pocket?” She shook her head and came up behind me. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and said into the side of my neck, “Running is safe, Eddie. My resting pulse is fifty-eight. My blood pressure is one hundred over sixty. Running cannot hurt me. It might be the safest thing I do all day long. It’s peaceful. Why do I need a safety pocket? To carry a condom?”
I held up a pink spray bottle of ammonia and asked, “How about carrying this to spray mean animals? The ones who chase and bark. And bite.”
“Eddie, you are so sweet, but I’m not afraid of dogs anymore. That was twenty, no—cripes!—that was thirty years ago. I’m not afraid of dogs anymore. I’m not afraid of anything anymore. And, honey, this stuff reeks. I couldn’t run with it on me.” She hugged me again before she walked away and said over her shoulder, “Please get that smell out of here.”
In the end, I convinced her she couldn’t run without some protection. I think I convinced her. Maybe I just wore her down. I failed at convincing her to be afraid, though. She conceded that she would use my pockets to carry her cell phone when she ran. I tried not to call her, but sometimes she was out there way too long.
“Eddie—huff—what do you want?” she demanded.
My heart lightened and my shoulders unclenched. “Just making sure you’re still alive,” I said happily.
She was alive, but not happy. “Ed—huff—the reason I have the cell phone with me in—huff—this ridiculous pocket—huff—is to call you if I need you—huff—not for you to call me. Got that?” and she was gone.
Those pockets were great.
37
Approaching the End: Memory Leaks
In good times and in bad, in sickness and in health—marriage provides all of these scenarios in an unpredictable medley. During our bad times, the months right before her deathday, there was nothing I could do to make Anna smile.
On a morning in late September, back on the wrong side of the sun, I was acutely aware of the path of the Earth as it zoomed toward my wife’s deathday. We’d been avoiding each other for weeks, so I knew when Anna voluntarily spoke to me that she must have felt desperate.
I caught her in a rage, throwing keys and her purse to the floor while she emptied the junk drawer and dug under the couch cushions while Joey waited for her in the car.
“Anna, what’s wrong?”
She glanced at me, pissed. Then she said, “Hold on, will you?”
I did.
As she rushed past me, she barked, “I’m late, Eddie.”
She was like the Tasmanian devil. I should have known better than to step in her path, but I am a fixer. I couldn’t help myself, but maybe I could help her. “Can I help?”
She glared at me, and I felt guilt creep up between my shoulders, like whatever she’d lost had been hidden by me. “No. Just leave me alone and I’ll find it myself.” She marched into the bedroom.
I followed her because I’m an idiot.
“Just tell me what you lost,” I offered.
“Can you hold on?” she asked. “Ed, I don’t have time to talk about it. I’m late.” She swiped everything off of her dresser with one hand. “Picture twenty kids bouncing off the walls with no teacher in the room. Their day won’t start until I arrive. And when I get there,” she tossed the pillows off the bed, “first I have to explain to the pissed-off principal that I’m late again because I couldn’t find my damn—” she paused, stopped yelling, and whispered, “cell phone.”
She stopped and straightened up, silent and still. Stricken. She turned her back on me and said, “Okay. Sorry.” A deep ragged breath, then, “Yeah, Michelle, I’ll talk to you tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Love you, too. ’Bye.”
As she lowered it from her ear, Anna stared in disbelief at the cell phone in her hand. The cell phone for which she ripped our house apart. One half of my mind told me this should be funny. It would be funny if I didn’t know why it was happening. Anna couldn’t keep her thoughts unscrambled with her deathday approaching and exerting its gravitational force field on her.
My sad wife looked up at me, met my eyes full on for the first time in a month, pleading with me to help her laugh this one off.
I couldn’t do it. We weren’t in our time when we could laugh together. We were on the bad side of the sun. I watched a tear drip from her chin. I shook my head and walked away. I’m sure I just looked disgusted with her. Inside I was falling apart right alongside her.
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I knew things were getting even worse when she called me on that same cell phone later that week while she was out running.